[Glenn Wright]

Hi, Max—

I like the compression of “The Empty Playground” and the strong contrast between the lighter, happier first stanza and the darker, sadder second stanza. I also like how you arranged the rhymes to underscore the reversal of tone and connect the two stanzas with the C rhyme : ABBC CDDA. I also really like the alliteration/consonance in the last line imitating the sound of metal clanking on metal.

There is more going on under the surface in the second stanza. It seems that something terrible has happened. A school shooting? Estrangement from older children? The ordinariness of the first stanza sets up the expectation of disaster in the second. The word “tumult” suggests violence. The trash can has been overturned, but the wind is not identified as the cause. The word “empty” suggests the parent’s helplessness to provide the values represented by the missing flag. The reader wonders if the parent has returned many years later to a once familiar and comforting scene in a state of incipient dementia, only to find it in ruins. The “then/now” contrast is powerful in the short poem.

I feel guilty for possibly being the reason for losing the fading “hopscotch crosses” which worked beautifully with the flagless flagpole to suggest the abandonment of the parent’s values by his children or their generation.

I wondered how the poem would play if the parent narrated in first person. By using a detached narrator who addresses the parent in second person, you open the door to the reading that the parent is suffering not only from nostalgia, but possibly dementia. If that is your intent, then you chose the perfect POV.

Very fine work.

Glenn